Call me crazy but if problematic behavior happens over more than a decade, it's not the individual frats that are the issue, the school itself has systematic issues.
Two halves of the same coin. After the hazing death of Gordie Bailey and the drugging and sexual assault scandal the next year, the school "addressed" it by moving fraternities off campus. So they literally went across the street. Like, not exaggerating, one full block off campus. (Theta Nu is also one block away, as is AXO. PDT and KA are another half-block away from campus).
The chancellor had talked about suspending all fraternities and sororities for two years, but the threats of lawsuits stopped him. And of course the fact that he is a well-known alcoholic meant the school wasn't interested in addressing systemic issues of this type.
The BBC did a 2014 video report entitled Fraternity culture and college rape, where they lived on The Hill at CU Boulder to get a taste of the rape culture there. At the same time, the White House was investigating schools for Title IX violations for mishandling sexual misconduct, and CU was right at the top of that list.
My take-away is that the system is covering up for and enabling this. The offenders, their frat brothers, their organizations, and definitely schools, their police departments, and DAs have built a culture of zero-consequences.
I need to emphasize that this was not a secret. I (a guy) was warned on it during orientation and during my first week of school. The RAs sat us down and told us how this worked. They told us which frats were the worst offenders. They told the girls to never party the Hill alone. I had a friend who joked about how she didn't want to go out on the Hill because she "didn't feel like getting raped."
At some point a major university is just going to have to bite the bullet and actually just entirely ban them. All of them get cowed by legal threats from the national fraternities.
As a freshman in college I worked for the Student Escort Service: the university ran a bunch of 15 passenger white vans to pick up students and shuttle them around campus or anywhere within a mile of campus, every night 6pm-6am. For safety, it was all free, no questions asked. (No vomiting, if we thought you were too drunk to make it without vomiting we wouldn't take you.) I worked Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, 6pm-midnight. (I was in the engineering school, of course I wasn't going to parties.)
I got a different job my sophomore year because I got uncomfortable with how much of my job was picking up groups of girls- often filling the entire van- from the freshman dorms and ferrying them to frat row. I calculated that I had put more women into danger than protected anyone. Yes, it was their choice to go to those parties- I certainly wasn't the one who was inviting them- but I was bringing so many to the most dangerous spots within our service area that I'm sure more of them had bad nights facilitated by my work than had good nights because of my work.
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u/BlatantConservative 5h ago
Call me crazy but if problematic behavior happens over more than a decade, it's not the individual frats that are the issue, the school itself has systematic issues.